Interview: Amiel Courtin-Wilson

Daily life with Cecil Taylor

Cecil Taylor, photographed by Amiel Courtin-Wilson, 2015 or 2016

I haven’t offered an update on my book, In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor, in a while, so here’s one. It’s almost finished! I’m writing the last two chapters (they were originally one long chapter, but I decided they needed to be two) now, and will then be punching in a few things into earlier chapters, but by the end of this month or early December I expect the rough manuscript to be complete. At that point, I’m going to send it to a fellow writer for a read-through, and once I take his changes on board, it’ll go to the publisher in January.

One of the fascinating aspects of the last few years of Taylor’s life was his relationship with Australian filmmaker Amiel Courtin-Wilson, who traveled to New York without any prior notice, got Taylor’s address from poet Steve Dalachinsky, and camped out on his front steps for a week in the spring of 2014. When Taylor finally opened the door, Courtin-Wilson moved in, and stayed there for two years, living downstairs, helping Taylor with his day-to-day life, arranging for his writing to be organized and scanned, getting him to doctors, and making a documentary about him. Two documentaries, in fact: the first is The Silent Eye, a short film of Taylor playing as Min Tanaka danced around the house, and the second is a longer, more ambitious piece that has yet to be released.

I first met Courtin-Wilson in February 2016, when I interviewed Taylor at the Whitney Museum for The Wire. I got back in touch with him earlier this year and we had a fascinating conversation via Zoom which has given me a lot of information and perspective for the book’s final chapter. I’m going to share some of the transcript below, for paying subscribers.